With writer-director Christian Petzold, much of what he gives you is right up front, as in his sometimes too on-the-nose (albeit beautiful) film titled ​Phoenix.  That much remains the same in his latest film Transit, which is the third of his loosely related trilogy "Love in the Time of Oppressive Systems".  As its title suggests, it not only deals with the characters who are searching for literal transits out of their situation, but also the limbo they find themselves in.

Georg (Franz Rogowski) is one such character who is trying to escape the encroaching fascist regime.  What year it is is also a surprisingly opaque detail.  It feels like 1940s Germany, but there are no swastikas, and the dress and transportation seem fairly modern.  Although based on a 1944 book by Anna Seghers, Petzold strips the movie of any period clues, leaving us in another sort of purgatory that brings the narrative closer to us.  One woman points after a fleeing Georg at one point, for all the world sounding like an informant yelling after a Jew.  And yet at another, Georg connects with a North African immigrant and her son.

Georg impersonates a dead man in order to obtain a visa and papers to flee Europe, but with that come all sorts of entanglements with other refugees, including Marie (Paula Beers), who is that dead man's wife and searches for him, ignorant that he has passed away.

Transit has a framing device of a narrative within a narrative that is jarring at times, but then only adds to the surrealism of the story.  What we're narrated verbally isn't always met with what actually happens before our eyes.  It also immediately enforces a distance from the characters that is echoed by the distance from the action which induces shame in the bystanders of the story.  There's a skewed logic at times in the ways characters act, as if they are party to the whims of a writer.  But again, this only underscores the tragedy of the skewed logic of oppression that is all too real.

Petzold has always given the impression of a Hitchcockian noir filmed in the present, with crisp colors as well as shadows.  It's a style that's evocative of the old suspense master while being completely now.  Marie flits like a ghost through each scene, haloed with importance even before she's introduced into the story like a soft surround of Kim Novak.  And yet, the range of colors achieved by cinematographer Hans Fromm is thoroughly modern, from the blues of the night train travel, to the hues of late French cafes, and the baking sun of Marseille.

Transit perfectly evokes the purgatoric in-betweenness of its characters and their situations, unable to shed their past to embrace their future.  Georg is time and time again driven by his guilt, trying to assuage it, even as he becomes more than a simple bystander who only wants to survive.  However, Petzold reminds us that the only way to change our narrative is to remember our past and learn from it.  The future determines as much of the past as the reverse, or as one character puts it:  "Who forgets first?  The abandoned one or the one who left him?"  Perhaps it is whoever moves on first.

Ash is the Purest White, the latest from Jia Zhangke (Mountains May Depart, Touch of Sin), could stand as a bravura showcase of Zhao Tao who plays the protagonist Qiao throughout the years, immutable as China radically changes all around her in this epic that spans 17 years.

The film starts with Guo Bin (Liao Fan), a local crime boss, and his girlfriend Qiao who epitomize the kind of gangster cool a la John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat.  And although Qiao starts the story firmly claiming to be outside of the criminal underworld her partner overlooks, she finds herself holding on to its tenets after everything else has moved on.  Qiao aloofly expresses disinterest in ballroom dancing, claiming that she's not into Western culture even though she's just come off of the floor joyfully dancing to "YMCA".  But during that joyful romp with her boyfriend, he drops his gun onto the floor and they both stare at it dumbfoundedly for a beat before she gets back into dancing with him again, adjusting to the shock.

The skill to adjust comes to the fore when years later, Qiao leaves prison to find China almost unrecognizable and her relationship with Bin equally so.

In one pivotal scene, Qiao and Bin discuss a dormant volcano and ask how they can know its potency if it hasn't stirred in years.  Qiao is that volcano of the film, purified by trial, and evincing a strength that never has to erupt to make itself known.  Her facial expressions and feelings are masterfully revealed (or held in check), and Jia keeps the camera lens often at a distance.  Her anguish, frustrations, and sadness simmer at that space.  They're often ripples in a calm facade that are easily missed if you're not paying attention.  Bin is certainly unable to perceive her, to adapt, or to conquer his pride...something that gets in the way of understanding the significance when they both return to the spot that overlooks the same volcano years later.

Qiao holds herself to a moral code, the code of the underworld, long after it's been disavowed and forgotten by the surrounding country.  Ash is the Purest White is as much about Qiao's endurance through the radical transformation of China as it is about her changing relationship with Bin.  Ash takes place over three progressive time chunks, with cinematographer Eric Gautier using different media for each period to highlight the passing of time.  The first goes from DV to 4K, emphasizing the pop of colors, which comes to the fore at the climax of that period during an almost sublime fight scene.  The second is shot on 35 mm, with a sort of grain and grace that mirrors Qiao's journey and maturity.  Even the sickly neon green in a motel scene is muted, lacking the same vitality of color as before.  And the final is shot in digital 5-6K, almost washed out of color, even as it's framed by a reminder of the present and future with its high-speed trains and security cameras.

Jia's film is one of both a grand and intimate scale.  He's always reminding us of China's wanton path of progress that pushes people from their homes because of a mine being overtaken or a new dam being built, but he frames it in Qiao's devastating journey as she tries to find herself after something much more personal displaces her.  It takes a phenomenal actress to direct attention in that way even in such a demanding setting, and Zhao does it all without gaudy theatrics.  Instead, her performance makes us feel keenly for her even if she only gives a scoff to the side or a slight twitch of the eyes.  Like Zhao, Jia's performance is neither heavyhanded nor aphoristic.  Instead, it gently reminds us of what we lose in changing times and of the impossibility of going back to our homes.

Jordan Peele's Us is either a cinematic achievement or a sophomoric slump, depending on who you talk to.  Unfortunately, his film's intent also seems to vary depending on whoever you happen to discuss it with.  I've heard all sorts of convoluted theories, and although a close watching (and rewatching) may reveal the actual answer, Us is not as tight as his debut Get Out.

Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong'o) plays the matriarch of the Wilson family.  They're fairly well-off and fairly average.  The father (Winston Duke) went to Howard, they have one son (Evan Alex) and one daughter (Shahadi Wright Joseph) who bicker reassuringly, and they're currently vacationing in their family cabin in Santa Cruz.  However, after a frightening encounter at the beach, Adelaide is beset by all sorts of forebodings which come to fruition that night when they are visited by another family of four who have their faces.

Us is rife with allusions, from the opening scene that zooms in on a smattering of VHS tapes framing a television set that plays a Reagan Era commercial.  And it's that language, as well as the carefully selected music pieces, that inform the film.  In many ways, it relies on our knowledge of tropes to build its unease.  The Jaws t-shirt that the son Jason wears is there to build our wariness of danger at beaches and the Thriller shirt that the girl wears in the opening scenes reminds us of horrific transformation and things that go bump in the night.  The C.H.U.D. VHS tape is a reference to both the plight of the homeless and subterranean terrors.  There's a white rabbit that leads the way to a topsy-turvy world and there are even a set of twins, which are both a reference to The Shining and to the duality that is a theme throughout Us.  But while all of these are carefully chosen and alluded to, if a viewer goes in blind, there is a lack of other scares, tensions, or frights cinematically.  A horror film needs more than a few scrapes of violin strings.  Furthermore, a working knowledge of horror films also should mean that its characters are more aware rather than succumbing to the usual ceaseless stupidity that accompanies such fare.  At this point, it's a disservice to Peele as a director and writer and to the audience that any of these should be used as a crutch.

The fright in Peele's film comes from the unknown within the known.  When the father, Gabe, asks the doppleganger family "Who are you people?", the answer in a dry, rasping voice is "We're Americans."  The line is there for laughs, but for Peele it is very literal.  Americans are afraid of the "other", but they're also afraid of themselves.  Not necessarily for individual sins, but for a collective consciousness and guilt that they're not taking responsibility for.  In Us, the characters are directly responsible for the lives of their others, whether they realize it or not, and then their worst fear is manifested when those shadow selves rise up.  Whatever that means for the average viewer (or the average American) -- poverty, homelessness, the current political climate, global warming-- perhaps Peele is getting more at our lack of public and social responsibility for the monsters we create rather than a specific issue.  The Reagan "Hands Across America Initiative" ad is an example of a sort of action that didn't end up meaning very much at all other than imbuing a sense of patriotism and what an American is--the sort of action where taking part was more of a show than an actual effort.

It's admittedly a broad (possible) explanation, but that is emblematic of the rather broad problems of the film.  It overexplains at some points, but the overexplanation only leads to more plotholes.  Us would have done better by scaling back on the reveal and allowing more strangeness, or for going all in for the social commentary.  The commentary as it is can only be theoretical, since there isn't a ton to back up any theory that anyone comes up with.  The obvious answer, given the Reagan ad in the beginning, would be that Peele is talking about the plight of the homeless and the have-nots, who are trapped and without opportunity to better themselves.  But it doesn't necessarily deliver.  Because Us​ wavers in a weird in-between where the style of the film has more sheen than the underlying story, it ultimately fails.

The style is admittedly gorgeous.  It Follows cinematographer Mike Gioulakis creates some gorgeous carnival scenes, bringing to mind the lights and pop of the vintagey decade of the other horror movie.  The colors are especially vibrant throughout, able to slice through the literal and figurative darkness of the film.  Lupita Nyong'o is even more so, able to completely convince us that her character and her doppleganger are completely different people.  She makes the movie frightening, with her vocal lisps and balletic movements.  Her character is the most fleshed out, with emotion and a closeness that comes from a well-rounded writing of her, so we end up caring far more about her than any other character in the story.  The other members of the family are more of a brief outline of the familial roles.  Furthermore, the editing of their lines and their rapport is strangely stilted at times, ruining the timing that's so important to both comedic and horror films.

Us has some good ideas and even better directing, but in the end it doesn't come together.  It doesn't work as either a fable or a scary movie, mainly because of that lack of cohesion.  It often confuses and it doesn't succeed in making us ask the right questions.  However, there are many good reasons to see it, and it has the unfortunate denigration of seeming poorer only because it comes after Peele's standout Get Out, which had a tighter vision.  Nevertheless, I'm excited to see what he comes up with next; there are nuggets of greatness in the film, and not only because he alludes to previous classics.

Spider-Man has always been a favorite of mine.  Peter Parker was a normal kid bitten by an extraordinary spider, and still dealing with all the travails as a kid from Queens, struggling with a bad internship, college classes, an ornery boss, and paying the rent.  There was something way more approachable about him, in a way that aliens with God-like powers, millionaires with butlers and secret batcaves, and playboy philanthropists with high-gadget suits never were.  His adjustment to his powers were more akin to a boy adjusting to puberty than a Captain American emerging out of a machine with bulging muscles.  But Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse had a tall barrier to crash, with its deluge of live action Peter Parkers in the last decade and even more saturated superhero market.  It's hard to make a case for wanting or needing more of either.

But Spider-Verse has created something both completely classic and completely new, blasting aside conventions and all our dread at "just another superhero" movie.

Is it the story?  Yes and no.  The titular Spider-Man this time is Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), half black and half Puerto-Rican.  This time he's not a boy from Queens, but a boy from Brooklyn.  He's won the lottery in getting selected for an uppercrust magnet school in the city and also in getting bitten by a radioactive spider.  Not long after the latter, evil-doers have disrupted the space-time continuum, which results in, wait for it, having to save the world, but also other Spider-Man versions from parallel dimensions who get sucked from their universes and into Miles'.

It's all a little heady, and it sounds like it could be as messy as an Avengers movie, but directors Bob Persichetti, Rodney Rothman, and Peter Ramsay are helped rambunctiously by writer Phil Lord (The Lego Movie) and the result is a totally off-kilter, incredibly complicated film that has an amazingly singular vision and direction, achieving clarity with each mindboggling push of the visual envelope.

Each Spider-Man counterpart is chosen for their individuality, highlighting a difference in animation, in gender, in style, and ethnicity.  Miles himself has his own rhythm, his own swagger, even as he's struggling to come into his own.  Spider-Man: Homecoming chose to eschew the origin story completely in order to deliver its fresh take on the worn tale.  Spider-Verse does the opposite and doubles down, but that's the beauty of it.  The movie, and Miles himself, is a thrillingly original, alive being.  You've never seen a Spider-Man like this.  But while the movie is about finding its uniqueness, it is concurrently about identifying with others.  At each point, Spider-Man is finally able to look at someone else and say "I know you.  You are me."  It is precisely that duality that Spider-Verse balances and thrives on.

Breathtakingly beautiful in animation, in music, in the undeniable pleasure and beat of the movie's rhythm.  Spider-Verse finally takes us back to the keen joy of superhero movies.  It flushes us in CMYK colors, squiggles come out of characters to indicate sensory emotions, and at some points the film dips into paneling and thought bubbles as it dips into the format that got us all into comic book heroes in the first place.  The whole voice acting team is again a joy to behold, and all the lines have the familiarity of an extremely well-thought out rhythm, like banter put to music.  It's the best animation of the year in every way possible -- visuals, acting, story, and animating innovations.

Moore's voice is the emotional core of the movie, one where the peril and sentiment aren't contrived.  Its message resonates with the viewers, not just because of how potent it is or how imperative it is to revel in both our individuality and being able to recognize ourselves in others.  There's a moral imperative Miles shares with us without having to hit us over the head with it.  Miles is able to overcome and to grow not only because his great power gave him great responsibility, but through his acknowledgement of his power, which is inherent in any one of us.  Spider-Verse's themes of identity are essential, but its most thrilling aspect might be that any one in the audience can, in some way, point at the screen and say "I know you.  You are me."

Film auteur Lee Chang Dong has taken Haruki Murakami's sparse 10-pager Barn Burning and turned it into a 2.5 hour elegy of fierce loneliness and simmering rage in the film Burning -- a story that both expands its Murakminess while becoming something completely individual.  Never has Murakami been adapted so well, or subverted so significantly.

The film opens on Jongsu (Ah-in Yoo) making a delivery to a shop where he clearly catches the eye of one of the girls working at the front, scantily clad and dancing to promote the store's sales.  Her name is Haemi (newcomer Jong-seo Jun), and it turns out that she's an old neighbor, whom he ends up not recognizing.  It might be because of the plastic surgery she had, she offers blithely, or it might be because his memory of his childhood waxes insubstantial most of the time.  He clearly doesn't remember the time that he crossed the street to tell her she was ugly when they were kids, but that also doesn't stop him from being completely taken by her now.  She becomes the object of his desire, partially because of her attraction to him, and partially because of his...well, objectification.

Murakami is known for writing accomplished, lonely men who exist vaguely alienated.  Jongsu is certainly lonely, but in him simmers an anger as well as an existential ennui.  He's an aspiring writer who can't write because he doesn't understand the world around him; he's a college graduate who can't hold down a job, a former creative writing major who cleans cow droppings.  Surprisingly, Murakami's cypher makes a sort of appearance in the form of Ben (Steven Yeun), the man who arrives to become the point of the love triangle involving Jongsu and Haemi.  Mysterious and cosmopolitan, not quite belonging, and yet affecting an easy privilege as he cooks pasta while listening to jazz.  His laconic posture and obvious wealth stun a round-shouldered Jongsu, who is only a few years younger and can't fathom this kind of achievement.  At first, he can only sit idly by while Ben sweeps Haemi off her feet.

While Murakami's writing tends to leave loose threads at the end, Lee has created a story that permeates the ambiguity throughout.  It's carefully orchestrated to heighten its nebulous qualities and it does so masterfully.  Several of the key scenes are shot at dusk (including one incredible dance to jazz music which searches for greater meaning only to disintegrate into its lack -- it's quite possibly one of my favorite scenes of the year), that time where night is as strong as day.  Lee explores those imprecise boundaries constantly:  Jongsu's old farmhouse is an area of land that is slowly becoming encroached upon by the city and he lives close enough to the DMZ that he can hear North Korean propaganda being blasted from across the border.  Ben is a character that doesn't entirely belong in South Korea, and even his highly sophisticated language is peppered with oft-Anglicized words and the accent is just off enough to make you feel its foreignness even if it's impeccable otherwise.  But more than that are the borders between morality, which are played with constantly here.  Even a brief side view of a newscast of Trump reminds us that not everyone operates on the same rules of truth.

Burning is stunning in every facet.  The actors live their parts rather than act them out;  there is a deep understanding that they have achieved of their characters that we as an audience will never fully know.  Yeun is a revelation, making a new turn as a sinister, indeterminate figure.  The story hinges on both the familiarity and stark unknowableness of his character, and Ben is at turns terrifying and suave.  There's so much he claims to not feel and so much he gives the affectation of knowing, but neither stops him from thoroughly enjoying the spectacle before him.  Yoo is a powerhouse of constrained emotion -- it's fitting that we never see the release of his masturbation and that one of his wrought confessions of love midway through the movie is just laughed away.  Even as his helplessness and confusion mount however, the distortions are often only shown on his face in the aftermath of waking up from troubled dreams.  Jun is also sensational here, literally fresh-faced, disarming in her childlike but not childish behavior.  But it's the writing, the direction, and the colors that bring everything together.  Burning is paced meticulously and it shouldn't surprise anyone that cinematographer Kyung-pyo Hong's last film was The Wailing, which also has gorgeous fog-rimmed mountainous backdrops.  Lee's beauteous long-shot takes subside into darkness, pushing the limits of what our eyes can make of expressions and feelings in the gloaming of its characters.  His writing is clever and sophisticated, giving each character a different flavor, always revealing just enough to make us ask more.

I won't go into the details of the story, but it's clear that aspiring writer Jongsu isn't the only character who struggles to create a narrative, even going so far as to fabricate one when writing a petition partway through the film.  Haemi is searching for what she calls "Great Hunger" and there's an effacement not only physically by changing what she looked like, but in the stories she weaves.  There's a warring desire to be found, but also to disappear.  Burning is about class disparity, an anger that has no outlet, and the destruction that comes from creating.  Throughout the film, Lee gives us mysteries that will linger and mysterious characters.  Who is Haemi?  Who is Ben?  The genius is that by the end, it burns out to ask us the actual question:  Who is Jongsu?

Alfonso Cuarón's Roma is visually phenomenal and Proustian in this deeply personal cinematic story.  Although available for streaming on Netflix, it is currently showing in various theaters worldwide for a limited run and should really be seen on the largest screen possible.

Roma is not just about its heroine, a maid named Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), but the confusion of the life around her in Mexico City.  Appropriately, Cuarón favors long takes where the camera moves slowly around the room, even from the start which shows Cleo moving around the large house that she takes care of.  Often when it cuts to the next scene, the camera continues the same motion as before, making it feel as if we are in a consistent, continual motion.  Roma emphasizes this impartiality to viewpoint by the constant panning, but also the marriage of action between the foreground and background.  Like life, there's always something else going on outside of what feels to be your own story -- sometimes it aligns with yourself and at others it seems to be a cruel juxtaposition.  At one point, the story's main family dejectedly eats ice cream cones after an announcement of a tragedy while a joyous wedding blares right behind them.  Cuarón's Mexico City is a cacophony of class disparity, of protests, but also of very human problems of the heart.

Roma was shot in a wide 2.35:1, both physically and mentally enlarging the scope of Cuarón's vision.  It's rare that he allows the frame to be centered on one person, but none of those moments should be taken for granted.  It's there we can see who Cleo is -- we see her eyes shine as she looks on someone she loves, or we see the thoughts skitter across her face as she looks outside of a car window.  Sometimes, the wide screen is meant to show us how small she is in the world, like when she's pummeled by wave after wave in the ocean, but others are meant to show us how she looms so much larger than the world itself.

Cuarón has done something phenomenal here in that he is retelling his childhood (he is apparently one of the children in the family that Cleo takes care of), but was able to tell a story that is outside of himself.  Although Roma is constructed mostly from his memories of the time, the film is careful to detach itself from the viewpoint of the children.  The sheen of Roma's 4K, black and white, and 2.35 format is a blessing and a curse.  The deep depth of field (literally and figuratively) is razor-sharp.  We're able to see everything happening on the screen, but there's a distance in how clean it is and how manufactured it comes off in the wide black and white.  There are times you wish you could feel things in the movie more tangibly, get a little more grit; there's a 70mm version out there that I'd dearly love to see, but hasn't received a wide theatrical release.  The sharpness gives it an arthouse quality, an almost omniscient viewpoint of life's profundities in the details.

Ultimately, that visual focus consistent in every facet and intent of the film.  You get the feeling that everything is articulated, captured, and blocked just the way it was meant to be by the director, which is another reason why it can be considered so personal to Cuarón.  Roma, for this reason, is a masterpiece.  It emotes beautifully in its vision, both on screen and from the heart and mind of its creator.  Few artists can say that they've conveyed their story just in the way they wanted to -- Roma is that moment for Cuarón.

Yorgos Lanthimos' follow-up to last year's The Killing of a Sacred Deer goes back to the 18th century for a scathing period piece on the love and power dynamics between three women: Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), her most trusted adviser Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz), and a new servant Abigail (Emma Stone).

The Favourite, appropriately, is a battleground for the three actresses, each who put on blistering, darkly humorous performances that also manage to somehow evoke empathy at different parts in the film.  Who are we rooting for?  The answer is constantly changing, which we can attest to both the writing and the acting skill -- all three are deplorable women, and yet they're not monsters.  They're not necessarily nice people (as Abigail says, "As it turns out, I am capable of much unpleasantness") but they're undeniably human.

Lanthimos steps away from the story and script this time, which actually improves the piquant dialogue dramatically.  His previous movies, The Lobster and the aforementioned Sacred Deer, got most of its kicks out of its deadpan delivery and bizarreness.  The Favourite owes much to the timing of the lines, but fires up its verbal anachronistic flirting to the best.  The anachronism is there in the actions and words of the court, but also in the costumes which have a definite edge (as well as more contemporary techniques and materials such as denim) that is a reflection of the spoken barbs and the distortion of the world.  Lanthimos frequently angles the camera up at a character, and it's fascinating to note what power dynamics he alludes to with each viewpoint and how he personalizes a lens to each woman.  His extreme wide angles show us the full opulence of the surrounding set (such a contrast from the stark, minimal glacial atmosphere of ​Sacred Deer), but also show us how hemmed in and insignificantly small the characters are.  The lavishness adds to the claustrophobia and the constant borders and lines emphasize confinement.  There's constant use of a fish-eye lens, which through its bloatedness is constantly reminding us of the excess of the court as well as the fact that this is a manipulation of history as it happened through the visual perversion.

That is part of the interesting contrast here as he clearly employs natural lighting as much as possible, which is most apparent in the lovely scenes where a person crouches in a dark corridor with only a brightly burning candle to illuminate their features.  Lanthimos shoots 35 mm which gives a lovely tone and grain to those images.  However, he has no problem showing his hand as a director and story-maker, of bringing the audience out of the story to remind them that what they are seeing is a fabrication.  The Favourite is told in chapters, each section coming with a title card.  Other than the fish-eye, there are swish pans, and action is often done on a Libra Head, giving both a smoothness and often a sort of physical "come look at this action with me" movement.

The obvious fabrication of the story does more than add to the fun and playfulness however; it does more to remind us how their relationship and power struggle can be reflected in contemporary times.  Queen Anne's subjects are at the whim of their monarch's petulant mood swings and whoever can flatter her best at the moment.  Furthermore, the war is not always won by those who love best or who are the most capable, but by whoever is most skilled at bamboozling others.

Lanthimos is not known to be tender towards his characters, but The Favourite at least is actually a story of its women rather than an exercise on a hypothetical.  Anne, for example, could easily be a monster to behold on many levels.  However, her dotage on her pet rabbits is representative of her burden.  They symbolize both her helplessness in situations small and large, and also the tragedies of a past she is unable to move on from.

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan does terrific work in collaboration with Lanthimos here, showing a large departure from the light-dripping American Honey.  The music, like everything else, veers from period appropriate to not with the harpsichord leanings of Vivaldi to the atonal scrapes of Messiaien.  It's lavish at times and startlingly austere at others.

The Favourite is not a particularly warm story, but it is visually extravagant, and features three powerhouse performances that aren't to be missed.  With all its obvious technique, Lanthimos' best move was in the casting of this well-written and stellarly-performed piece.  Through all its reference of black and white, both visually and metaphorically, it's the shades of grey here that take this movie up a notch from what he's done before.

In Border, Swedish customs officer Tina (Eva Melander) has an inexplicable but undeniable talent for sniffing out the feelings of people around her -- she can smell anger or guilt, which allows her to uncover any number of crimes enclosed within the people walking by her inspection point.  Her senses go haywire one day when Vore (Eero Milonoff) comes through, and she encounters for the first time someone who looks like her but at the same time holds no shame or apology for it.  It's hard to tell which aspect is more intoxicating to her, which has consequences that alter her world irreparably afterwards.

Abbasi's second film is based on a short story by Let the Right One In's John Ajvide Lindqvist and features the same sort of ubiquitous loneliness of the Other.  Abbasi has said he wanted to emphasize the experience of being a minority, and Tina is repeatedly shown to be maligned, sometimes subtly but often not.  She is stared at in grocery stores, she finds herself looking at closed doors that she realizes she has no power to open, and she lives with someone whose indifference is outmatched by the outright aggressive behavior of his three dogs who clearly detest her.  And yet, to typify her experience as a metaphor for the minority, for the immigrant or for the transgender (both of which Abbasi denies), is irresponsible when we see how the story unspools.  In many ways, Border is a love story...not even necessarily of Tina and Vore, but of Tina and herself.  For Tina, she is able to feel both remarkably beautiful but also finds liberation in being normalized.  But while it's important for her to grow and appreciate herself, it is not necessary to do so at the price of discarding humanity itself, especially if she is meant to embody a minority.

As a character, Tina is kind -- you see it in her interactions with others, namely her father, and in the childlike wonder as she communes with nature and the animals around her (besides, for whatever reason, dogs).  The film tries to balance a high-falutin idea in introducing the worst of humans, and yet emphasizing that perhaps it is the best of what humans are capable of that prevents Tina from completely abandoning them.  No more should be said plot-wise at the risk of spoiling Border, but there is a disavowal of nuance and depth in Tina's ultimate choice.  Her kindness comes from some of the goodness in life, even as she has experienced cruelty.  When Abbasi looks through a cut and finds a scene or a frame that looks too "good", he'll reportedly cut it out, because he doesn't want the beauty of an image to distract from the film.  Unfortunately, this application applies to both his visuals and his storytelling, but to deny that beauty is to disturb the verisimilitude of its subject.  There is good in humans, and there is beauty in the life that Tina lives -- and to ignore that is to simplify the subtlety of her moral decisions. 

More than anything else, Border is interesting because of its genre bends and plot twists, but beneath the core of that there's not much of a beating heart.  Abbasi is certainly to be appreciated for what he has attempted with the film, but it could have spent more time on the borders between nature and nurture, the borders we place within our hearts, and the borders we traverse to connect with other people outside of those we look like.

A group of WWII soldiers must take down a Nazi radio tower in a small French town in order to allow the Battle of Normandy to take place.  In the catacombs of the church underneath the tower, they find horrors concocted by Nazi scientists intending to build an immortal army for the Germans.

To call Overlord a Nazi zombie flick is misleading, although that's the go-to phrase for this movie.  The Nazi/WWII backdrop is more of a convenience, considering its revisionist alternate history makeup of the army (no one bats an eye at the mixed races and the sergeant is a respected African-American man) and the ease of an indelibly evil adversary.  There aren't quite enough zombies to make it a zombie flick either, nor do we have the usual braindead bloodthirsty inanimate bodies scrambling around.

The reason this isn't a zombie movie is because it misses all the beats of its predecessors, even while making references to Moreau and Carpenter.  It takes itself completely seriously, almost to a flaw.  There are beats in the movie where you expect a joke, but Overlord purposefully elbows those moment aside as if to assure you how seriously we should take it.  This is fine, but it then makes it harder to excuse the lapses in judgment the characters make.  There are a few too many unzipped bags, syringes used with devil-may-care-consequences, or trusting peeks into darkened cells for any normal person to make.  There's an attempt at the theme of not becoming the monsters you're fighting, but it peters out fairly easily.  Boyce (Jovan Adepo) is the protagonist here and he serves as a moral compass for the group, supposedly not even able to kill a mouse.  But as Overlord progresses, he sometimes unwittingly shows the lack of moral compass for the story, including his readiness to move to violence in one scene.  There's no moral quandary or dilemma found there...in fact, you'd find more of that in Shaun of the Dead.

With all that said, however, Overlord is still a fun ride.  Part of this is because you come to love the troop, and that's always half the battle.  The characters are easily established in the first few minutes, from fast-talking Tibbet (John Maguro) to brooding transfer Ford (Wyatt Russell), and this unfortunately is what so many current horror movies lack and what their weakness is.  The livelihoods of these men wouldn't matter a whit otherwise, and thankfully we don't have that problem here.  The special effects don't have the same verisimilitude that, say, Saving Private Ryan does, but we don't really need it to.  The first sequence of their parachute jump is a completely whipped around, manufactured ride...but it's still exciting and breathless all the same.  On par with that is the discovery of the Nazi lab, which is manufactured and breathless in a different way.  The eeriness of that scene makes it one of the highlights of the movie, where otherwise things are little too matter-of-fact.

Zombie movies have often been a social commentary on the current events.  If Overlord were to serve that purpose, it might be the refreshing recourse of an easy bad vs good and being able to take matters into your own hands on the side of good.  The film might not be trying anything at all though, because the strength of Overlord is indeed in the artificiality of it, including its disavowal of the other horrors that can be (and were) created by those with power.  Its assurance of no moral grays is vaguely reassuring, and it's a movie that would be better categorized as an action movie that will engage the viewers for its runtime.

There's a scene in Wildlife when Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) takes her 14-year-old son, Joe (Ed Oxenbould), to see a wildfire raging in the Montanan forest.  "Do you like it?" she asks him.  His response is in the negative, as he gazes, bewildered and horrified at the destruction before him.

The same could be said of Joe's reaction to his mother's path of destruction in Paul Dano's directorial debut Wildlife.  The film is about the changing roles of a nuclear family in 1960s, but only tangentially.  Wildlife is told chiefly through the eyes of Joe, who is unaware of social shifts of the decade, and can only witness and feel what is happening to his family before him.

Jeanette is devoted-- supportive in every way and perfectly fulfilling all that the role requires of her as a good mother and wife.  This is perhaps why she reacts the way she does when her husband lets her down in conforming to his role of what a good husband should do in providing for the family.  Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), loses his job and decides to take on low-paying and dangerous work of fighting wildfires, ostensibly abandoning his family to do so.

Mulligan does an excellent job of playing an unmoored Jeanette, confident as she charges forward, and yet completely uncertain of what her identity is.  She's done her part, but what happens when her partner doesn't?  She takes on the role of an independent woman, but she's not sure of what that means for her or if she really wants to.  At one point, she says "If you have a better plan for me, tell me."  Early on in the movie, someone assumes she's angling for a job and she quickly assures them that she's a stay-at-home mom -- it becomes a bit of a loaded statement as the film proceeds. 

​The question of identity is one that the whole family struggles with to some degree.  For Joe, he's still maturing and his questions at first angle around the image of being a good son and football player.  He later takes a job where he is taking snapshots of perfect ideals, or perfect moments in time.  For Jerry, there's obvious hurt pride after losing his job, but he doesn't even seem to know what his pride is in.  His worry consistently is that Jeanette won't be mad at him, and he seems surprised when she doesn't fulfill that cliche.  Jeanette of course struggles to fit warring identities throughout the story.

Dano's assurance in composing the film is lovely -- there are some truly wonderful framing shots and for the most part, he avoids the pitfall of trying too hard.  There are a couple parts where the technicality of a shot gets in the way of the storytelling, but really only a few.  Dano's use of light and landscape is reminiscent of Kelly Reichardt, just one beautiful shot of a face angled in morning light after another.  His greatest strength is in the space he allows his actors -- Mulligan of course, but Oxenbould is really fantastic as a precocious adolescent whose love for his parents gives us a more forgiving lens to view the movie in.  Gyllenhaal is looser here than usual -- his film roles are often too controlled, too thought through before the film starts shooting.  Jerry is so uncertain and Gyllenhaal's portrayal of him is similarly ambiguous, making those moments where he crystallizes into hard focus that much more effective.

There are few times that Jerry and Jeanette come together in physical space, and they provide a poignant counterpoint throughout the film.  You can probably sketch the whole story from the weight of the glances Mulligan and Gyllenhaal share (or avoid) with each other.  Wildlife ​is seen through Joe's eyes, but everyone comes of age in this story, and the last scene is a truly heartbreaking portrayal of that.